To listen to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the 2017 Republican tax overhaul that limited state and local deductions to $10,000 was a devastating blow. The rich would flee, the middle class would suffer and blue state budgets would bleed. Perhaps this will come to pass over time, but so far, there are almost no signs of it.

New York, in fact, saw revenue rise $3.7 billion in April from a year earlier, thanks to a shift in timing of taxpayer payments, a stock market that rallied through much of 2018 and a decade-long economic expansion that’s pushed national unemployment to a 50-year low. Similar windfalls arrived in New Jersey, California and Illinois — states that, like New York, had warned of dire consequences from the law.

And it turns out that tax refunds across the U.S. in 2019 — those once-a-year checks from Uncle Sam that people use to pay credit card debt from Christmas or buy a washing machine — were roughly the same size as a year earlier.